Saturday, August 27, 2016
Bus People: a novel of the Downtown Eastside PART TWO
This is a serialized version of my novel Bus People, a story of the people who live on Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside. The main character, Dr. Zoltan Levy, is loosely based on author and lecturer Dr. Gabor Mate. It's a fantasy and not a sociological treatise: meaning, I don’t try to deal with “issues” so much as people who feel like they’ve been swept to the edge of the sidewalk and are socially invisible/terminally powerless. I’m running it in parts, in chronological order so it’s all there, breaking it up with a few pictures because personally, I hate big blocks of text.
Bus People: a novel of the Downtown Eastside
Part Two
"No one is as capable of gratitude as one who has emerged from the kingdom of night." Elie Wiesel
Aggie
Portman Hotel, Vancouver, B. C.
Cylinders. The backpack was full of
cylinders. It was not full of
junk. Not not not. And they’re not just any old cylinders,
they’re Edison Blue Amberols, the best kind you can get.
I
have to find more Blue Amberols. It’s
just a habit, I can quit any time I want to, just a little quirk of mine,
collecting. I collect all sorts of
stuff, birdcages made out of bamboo, salt-and-pepper shakers shaped like
people, macramé handbags made back in 1973.
My room here is full of stuff,
the social worker doesn’t like it, she complains about it all the time
and keeps telling me to clean it up, get rid of it all. But it’s cool, there’s no rats or anything,
it isn’t dirty, I keep order in the place.
Sometimes stuff falls down, there are loud crashes at night that disturb
the neighbours, particularly Porgy who lives just under me and is a light
sleeper. But at least I know where
everything is.
I didn’t even know what a Blue Amberol was
until I started going to flea markets about a year and a half ago. I saw these ornate-looking canisters with
flowery writing and ornamentation all over them – they were beautiful, and I
just had to buy one of them, not even knowing what was inside. It was only a buck and a half, what the hell,
I’ll go without lunch tomorrow. Maybe
it’s snuff or something, I thought, something Victorian, or at least Edwardian,
really old and maybe even valuable.
But it wasn’t snuff at all. It was a dusty old cylinder full of
grooves. Took me a minute to figure it
out, that this was something like a record, or what came before records, the
first medium for recorded sound. I felt
like I had seen one before, that I remembered it from somewhere. I had Porgy go on the internet and do a
search. I don’t have a computer, I don’t
know how Porgy can afford one, but he does and is obsessed with it.
Anyway, he tells me that this isn’t just
any sort of flea market hunk of junk but
a Blue Amberol, a particularly deluxe (back then) kind of cylinder recording
popular in the early 20th century.
They weren’t the earliest recordings – those were made out of brown wax,
with a few really early, rare ones made out of yellow paraffin, but even before
that, they used tin foil. No kidding – tin
foil on a rotating cylinder, scratched with a needle that picked up
vibrations. The basic principles of
sound recording. Think of Thomas Edison
at Menlo Park
When I was little, old records used to
scare me. I used to think. . . never
mind what I used to think. I had a hell
of an imagination. It got me in trouble all the time, at school, but even worse
at home. My mother used to say that I
made up stories, but to me, it was all completely real. I thought the voices on those old 78 r. p. m.
records had some sort of spooky power.
Like it was a kind of time capsule or something. The singing ones were weird enough, they all
had that muffled quality like the sound was coming out of a tiny little
closet, but the spoken word ones, they
really freaked me out. Used to make me
run out of the room, but my Dad, he’d make me listen to them, listen to Caruso
sounding like he was singing inside a cardboard box, or Dame Nellie Melba
warbling away, or something called the Wibbly-Wobbly Walk – God, the Wibbly-Wobbly
Walk scared the living shit out of me.
Couldn’t stand it, but my Dad made me stay and listen.
It was his collection and he was convinced
it was worth thousands, but now that I know something about early recordings, I
can see that what he had was virtually worthless. Too many scratches, ticks and
pops.
Dr. Levy, the one they call “Zee”? He’s
helping me deal with memories. He’s
good. I mean, he’s good if you’re in
pain or trouble, if you’re not, then forget about it, he can be a real hardass,
it’s surprising how cold he can be. But
I’ve seen him deal with guys so far gone from AIDS, the shit was pouring out of
them like lava, and he never bats an eyelash, just rolls up his sleeves and
cleans up the crap like it was nothing.
I like Dr. Levy.
But this guy on the bus today, this
Szabó. I know that’s his name, because
people talk about him. He has regular
habits, I’ll say that about him. I don’t
know where he goes exactly, somewhere around the Sunshine Hotel area, the real
asshole of Vancouver
Mine’s Blue Amberols. I’m glad this Szabó can’t look at me, because I just hate it when people stare at
my backpack, poke at it or ask what’s inside it. I had fourteen Blue Amberols crammed in there
today, and never mind that I haven’t
been able to afford a player yet, it’s only a matter of time.
I
guess listening to these things is going to scare the living shit out of
me. I take five hundred milligrams of
Seroquel every day, Dr. Zee is trying to wean me off it, he says I might have
been misdiagnosed, but I’m not so sure about that, I guess you could say I
scare easily, I was born minus a few
layers of skin. But this Szabó, he has
no face, or that’s what they say about him anyway, even though he sings. I’ve heard it, we all have. He sings without words, of course: “nggg, nggg, nggg” – it’s creepy, but
you know something, he has a good voice, and a Hungarian accent, even with no
words. I wish he’d go see Dr. Zee, he’d
be able to help him. That guy could’ve
helped Hitler get over his anger problem.
Maybe he could write things down on a piece of paper or a chalkboard, I
don’t know. Better than begging, which
is what Szabó does for a living now that he can’t see to paint. It’s sad.
I draw a disability cheque, it’s not much but it keeps me going, along
with whatever stuff I can make or sell or trade, even though I’m not allowed to
see my kids which sometimes makes me want to slit my fucking throat, just end
this, end it now. But Dr. Levy
says don’t, Dr. Levy says don’t think that way, he says I’m valuable, he says
there’s only one of me in all the world, that human beings are irreplaceable,
so I guess I better trust his judgement which might be just a little bit
clearer than mine.
Anyway, Szabó gets on the bus this
morning, it’s one of those stinky wet mornings when everything’s dripping, and
he sits right down beside me like he’s done so many times before. Like I say, regular habits. And Szabó is clean, not like a lot of the
people who take the bus every day; he doesn’t ever smell, he looks after
himself. I don’t know how he does it, but he does. Pride. He must have hair still, I mean, the back of
his head must still be OK, just his face is missing, no big deal, nothing serious, eh? But then a guy across from us on the sideways
seats says, “Hey, fucking freak, you on a pass from the sideshow? Gettin’ it on
with the Schizo Lady?” Street people
have got radar, that’s how they can tell.
“I beg your pardon, buddy, if you wanna
see a freak, I think you should maybe try looking in the mirror.” I’m usually not this bold, but poor Szabó
can’t speak up. Can’t defend himself,
but he can hear everything. It’s
cruel. This guy across from us, he looks
like a bad bowel movement after too many blueberries, long and snaky and
tattooed dark indigo all over every square inch of his skin. He’s a living shit. And he’s calling us freaks. Jesus.
I keep trying to tell Dr. Levy what it’s like, but he just shakes
his head. Says people call him a Kike or
a Yid or a Heeb sometimes, but it’s not the same, it’s not. “Hey! Auschwitz !” one of them said to him once – and, yeah, he is pretty
thin, looks kind of undernourished. How does that go? “He hath a lean and hungry look.”
So the driver, his name’s Bert Moffatt, I
know him ‘cause I’ve seen him lots of times before on the Number 42, he says to
me, “Lady, would you kindly can the comments, you’re being abusive here.” I’m being abusive. If a schizo lady raises her voice even a
little bit, she’s being abusive, she’s out of control, while this big
blue-tattoo shithead over here, he can hurl insults at anybody he likes. Why? I don’t know, I guess he’s supposed to
be sane. Probably a pimp, probably a
heroin addict or a child molester or sells his grandmother for a hit of crack,
but he’s allowed to say whatever he likes.
Fuck it, I’m going back to the flea market
tomorrow and buy that cylinder player I saw, it was priced at $75.00 which for
me is a bloody fortune, and it looked busted, the ones that work cost way more
than that and are out of my price range, but you can usually bargain with these
guys, and I have $50.00 scraped together already, it took me months and months
of going without smokes, and then I found a ring in the washroom at the
Tinseltown Theatre, pawned it and got nearly 30 bucks for it which goes to
prove that there is such a thing as Providence
Zeddyville
They call it Needle Park Pigeon Park
It’s a loitering sort of place, an unplace. A dislocation. Calling it a park is an
impossible stretch, for no green thing could grow here. Dr. Zoltán Levy barely notices it any more.
He has a very fast walk, but it’s not so he can get away from the horrors of
the neighborhood. It’s so he can zip
from the Portman to the Sunshine to the Waverley Hotel to get to his patients,
the people who are usually on their last gasp.
Dr. Zee doesn’t step on the bus very
often, but it disgorges passengers right outside his home base, the Portman, an
armoured truck of a place, fortified, barred, battened down like the good
doctor’s own bleak, unsmiling face. He
makes himself available to people, people like Aggie Westerman the chronic
schizophrenic, and Porgy Graham who has a strange obsession with his bowels, and Dave the
mutilator who has his lips multiply pierced and chained together, so he can’t
even eat without pulling all the studs out.
Things happened to Dr. Zee a long time
ago, everybody knows that, or at least they suspect it, though no one has any
specifics, and he isn’t talking. He
“doesn’t have time for a relationship”.
That’s what he says when he is interviewed, which happens quite a lot
now, because slowly but surely, Dr. Zee is
starting to become famous. At
least, Vancouver
People ask him, often, if the work is
depressing. What depresses him is the
question: the implication that he is
dealing with the dregs of humanity, and not a whole lot of bruised little kids
in adult bodies, people who were fucked by their fathers or whipped senseless
by their mothers or told they were useless piles of shit so often they began to
believe it, or told that they never should have been born at all. It does a bit of damage when you hear it
often enough; it can warp a life into a howling parody, heroin squirting up
through the veins to blot out the self-loathing for just a little while, a
protected, peaceful while, until it’s time to start hustling again. The abyss
of the heroin state is welcome, oblivion being far more bearable than whatever
is in second place.
Tourists come to Zeddyville because the
area is a little bit famous, too, kind of like Dr. Zee himself, and even the
Governor-General came once, on a walkabout like the Queen Mother, her face in a
carefully-composed mask of what she hoped was concern. It doesn’t smell too good down here, it
smells like rancid piss at the best of times, human vomit, pot fumes and other
things you can’t identify. It’s a raw wound, the walls of the buildings
splattered in gory-colored murals and gang graffiti impossible to decipher, the
strange hieroglyphics of the street. You
have to keep your cool in Zeddyville, not show any fear. It helps not to make eye contact, as you’ll
stare into an abyss, a vacuum, an absence in the eyes of every stranger that
passes by.
“Spare change? Spare change?
Have a nice day. Spare
change? Spare change? Have a nice day.” It’s a sort of mantra for a lot of people, a
way to make it through to the next day of spare change, spare change, have a
nice day. Of course some of the
people here are crazy. There used to be
a place called Valleyview, but they closed it down except for the really
hard-core cases, and shouldn’t these people be integrated into the community
anyway and not just institutionalized and kept out of the mainstream, hidden
away like they’re frightening or shameful?
Now the dirty little secret of mental illness is an open secret, like
Szabó’s face when it was shot off and blown to bits all over the blackened
walls of his torched studio. The walking
wounded don’t have their intestines hanging out all over the outside of their abdomen, like in a war, but
they do have spilled psyches, their pain hanging out, their loneliness hanging
out, and it bothers people, the normies, the civilians. Their faces broadcast
what they feel: for God’s sake get
away from me buddy before I see myself again, before I see what’s really wrong
with me and why I cannot find a place in this world, before I see that this is
where I really belong.
For no matter how good I look on the
outside, I am part of this whole deal that creates a Zeddyville in the middle
of a glittering, prosperous, showcase city on the coast of the best country in
the world, then forces people to live in it when living is just a simple, bare
act of endurance.
We shove them here, we forklift,
steamroll, corral, push, shove, cram, then clang the gate shut behind them and
then say, what’s wrong with these people, why can’t they get it together,
why can’t they make something of themselves?
Get a job!
Leave me alone!
NO, I don’t have any spare change, and put
that squeegee away because I am not interested in the fact that you haven’t had
anything to eat for four days! Jesus,
these people.
Dr. Zee sees, hears, senses it all the
time, a palpable sense of dismissal and fear echoes all around him, the long
antennae sticking out of his head pick it all up, whether he wants to hear it or not, but he
keeps on walking fast with his stethoscope going bounce, bounce, bounce on his
chest. He doesn’t really have one around
his neck, it just appears that way, it’s his sense of purpose, so intense and
focused, it’s almost a buzz. He doesn’t
carry a black bag either, but he will go where the trouble is, he will go where
the pain is, and down here, there is more than enough to go around.
Bus People Part One
Bus People Part Two
Bus People Part Three
Bus People Part Four
Bus People Part Five
Bus People Part Six
Bus People Part Seven
Bus People Part Eight
Bus People Part Nine
Bus People Part Ten
Bus People Part Eleven
Bus People Part Twelve
Bus People Part One
Bus People Part Two
Bus People Part Three
Bus People Part Four
Bus People Part Five
Bus People Part Six
Bus People Part Seven
Bus People Part Eight
Bus People Part Nine
Bus People Part Ten
Bus People Part Eleven
Bus People Part Twelve
Friday, August 26, 2016
The path falls away behind you
This is the Gospel according to Popeye: an image I've been almost obsessed with lately. And it took some work to find it. It wasn't apparent which of the several hundred Popeye cartoons it was in, so I started googling things like "Popeye on rope bridge" and "Popeye on rope bridge falling down".
So what is it about this teensy little cartoonlet that won't leave my head?
It always comes back to my work. I'm not saying my personal life is perfect. It never has been, and I am here to tell you, right here, right now, that my mental health hasn't always been great either. It has been variable. But that's not what gives me the existential blues over, and over, and over again.
For years I had this yearning - it was insanely intense, and it went on for years and years - to write and publish a novel. I kind of felt like that would solve everything that was wrong in my life.
I even remember sitting in a doctor's office while I was being treated for depression. I told her that if I ever published a novel, I knew would never be depressed again.
"What? . . . Why?"
"I'm depressed because I'm a loser, and if I publish a novel I won't be a loser any more."
Well, all that didn't work out so well! I DID finally get a novel in print, after one whole abortive attempt. I got better reviews for that one than I could have hoped for, and for the second one too. But I wasn't selling any copies. My sales records were worse than abysmal.
Convinced I could beat the odds, I flung myself at the barriers once again and wrote/sent out/published a third novel. Last year, I sold exactly three copies of my dream novel, The Glass Character. What is all this leading to?
I don't think I was cut out for success.
I was cut out for the work, I know it, or I wouldn't still be doing it. In fact, I still want my work out there so badly that I decided to dredge up a novel that REALLY never went anywhere, that stayed in a Word file for twelve years, and try to serialize it here, run it in chunks.
I guess you'd have to be half out of your mind to keep going back to a poisoned well like this. But I have this novel, untouched. It's called Bus People, and it started off simply as a novel about people who ride the bus (which I took every day of my life) and evolved into a sort of fable of life on the notorious Downtown Eastside of Vancouver. I wrote it in 2004, in a wild upgust of creativity that could have killed me. When I showed it to my then-agent and asked for her feedback, this was the sum total of it:
"I don't know if it's publishable or not." Full stop.
I needed to get out of "the business" probably right after my first novel tanked, but I didn't. I remember the call from my first publisher after Better Than Life came out, which went something like this:
"Margaret! It's a miracle! We have never had reviews like this, not in the whole history of our press."
"Oh! That's great! I guess I - "
"Now the bad news. You had the worst sales of any author we've ever published."
Badda-boom.
Probably what bothers me more than anything is the fact that my outstanding reviews were seen as a "miracle", a supernatural act, not the result of an insane number of years of hard work and effort.
All this is a long explanation for the strange posts I'm going to be running for the next couple of weeks. Or at least, I hope only a couple of weeks. The posts will be chunks of Bus People in chronological order, so that, unless I get no readers and decide to can the whole thing, by the end of it the whole novel will be up here.
I know you're not supposed to do it this way, but since when did I know the "proper" way to do anything? If it's not going to succeed in worldly terms anyway, which with my track record I know it won't, I might as well go ahead and do it any way I want. Setting up something separate for it is like opening the trap door before I even start.
Which is why I'm making Popeye gifs tonight. They're all from the same cartoon, called Popeye the Sailor. It's a Betty Boop cartoon, actually, in which BB "introduces" Popeye. The cartoon then becomes incredibly violent. What I notice most especially is the continual bobbing up and down of the characters, as if things had to be in motion at all times.
And when you reflect on it, which is not always the best idea, the path DOES fall away behind you, because with each day you live, another day is crossed off the total days allotted to you, whatever that might be.
Bus People: a novel of the Downtown Eastside PART ONE
This is a serialized version of my novel Bus People, a story of the people who live on Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside. The main character, Dr. Zoltan Levy, is loosely based on author and lecturer Dr. Gabor Mate. It's a fantasy and not a sociological treatise: meaning, I don’t try to deal with “issues” so much as people who feel like they’ve been swept to the edge of the sidewalk and are socially invisible/terminally powerless. I’m running it in parts, in chronological order so it’s all there, breaking it up with a few pictures because personally, I hate big blocks of text.
Bus People: a novel of
the Downtown Eastside
Part One
"No one is as capable of gratitude as one who has emerged from the kingdom of night." Elie Wiesel
PROLOGUE: The man with no face
Part One
"No one is as capable of gratitude as one who has emerged from the kingdom of night." Elie Wiesel
PROLOGUE: The man with no face
The man with the Elephant Man veil over
his head is a regular on the Number 42, getting on every day at 9:47 a.m.
Same time, same place. Broadway and Granville, heading north over
the bridge towards the Downtown Eastside.
Everyone is curious as to what he looks like
under the veil. It’s more of a burqa,
actually, veil implying something translucent, something gossamer, whereas this
is more of a blanket over his head, without any eye holes in it, because you
see, this man doesn’t have any eyes.
Eyes?
Hell, he has no face.
Once he had a face, but he blew it off one
day in a fit of rage. Rage at life, that
it could be so mean, so ungenerous to a man as talented as he.
An artist.
Maybe even a genius.
Living in a garret. It was more
of a studio, in fact, a big open airy loft with beautiful natural lighting,
where he both lived and worked, painted and ate and slept and had sex, wept and
raged when the work was not going well and the rent was overdue and his
girlfriend complained that he never took her anywhere, which was true, danced
heavily in his steel-toed work boots when a painting sold somewhere, even in a
tacky restaurant for peanuts, because it was nevertheless proof that yes,
he, Szabó, could make a living at this, that against the odds, and in spite of
everything his father had said to him, he could be an Artist.
His father used to curse at him in
Hungarian, tell him he was good for nothing, that he should have a trade, or at
least a job, a proper job digging a ditch, it didn’t have to be anything grand,
his grandfather dug potatoes all his life, and look at him, wise man, fourteen
children, he lived a great life, but to be an artist, surely that was a dream
for fools, it was impractical, he would never make a mark, he would never sell
a painting, he was living in a world of illusion, and sooner or later it would
all catch up with him, reality would close in, and he would realize that his
father had been right, that he should have gotten an education, that he should
have learned a trade, that he should have prepared himself for life, instead of
letting life just happen to him.
One flicked match, and the dream was
over. The studio went up like a torch,
and with it approximately 297 paintings, his entire life’s work. His oeuvre, gone in an instant,
irretrievable. Szabó did not believe in
insurance, and at any rate, how can you insure genius? How to replace the irreplaceable, the
inspiration of the moment, mysterious and unfathomable as life itself? So – ploomphth - there went all his canvasses up in flames, all
those carefully-wrought works stuck with eggshell and coffee grounds and sputum
and semen and even his own blood, torched up to the ceiling in a cloud of
greasy smoke: “like the smoke from the
crematoria at Auschwitz,” Szabó was to tell the therapist later on, back when
he could still talk, when he still had a jawbone and teeth and a tongue.
In the Old Testament, Moses keeps such
close company with Yahweh that his face shines unnaturally, giving off an eerie
light in a way that he fears will frighten his fellow believers. So he veils himself, covers the radiance to
tone it down. Szabó’s veil has a more
practical purpose. It is meant to hide
the evidence of despair.
It is meant to hide the evidence of a
failed attempt to die. Propping a
shotgun against your chin is a bad way to do it, Szabó; you could miss your
brain, blow your face completely off instead, and, in an ultimate act of wicked
self-punishment for the sin of trying to throw away the irreplaceable gift of
your life, survive.
For Szabó did not see, in that moment, in
that immutable instant that would change his life forever, that he was
the gift. Szabó believed, mistakenly,
that the gift was in those paintings, that the hoarded treasures rolled up and
stacked up in his storage room were in fact his worth and his life.
Such fragile belief. Such a thread to hang a life from. Snap, goes the thread. It all comes down, because Szabó couldn’t see.
It was not a good scene at the
hospital. All the nurses and attendants,
from the paramedics on down, even as they shoved tubes down his throat to keep
him breathing, even as they started the IV, all wished fervently that he would
just expire, and quickly too. Any other
result did not bear thinking about. The nurses whispered and murmured to each
other, half-ashamed of themselves for the things they were thinking, the things
they were saying.
All the while his heart kept beating,
steadily, steadily. Szabó was not ready
to die. As it turned out, he had missed
his brain completely. Though the front
of his head was one big ooze, practically a crater, with only vestigial jaw
left, and a bit of facial bone structure, he was literally left without eyes,
nose, chin, teeth, lips, and tongue.
He still had his mind, he still awareness,
he knew what was going on around him.
That was the horror of it; the horror.
His hearing was completely
unaffected. In fact it seemed to have
become more acute, perhaps to compensate for the loss of his eyes. So he could hear all the remarks of the
hospital staff as they worked on him that night: Have you seen this
one? No. Come on, take a look at it.. Oh
God. Sweet Jesus. This is a sad one. Don’t worry, he won’t make it ‘til
morning. Well, let’s hope not. Nobody can live like this.
There was surgery. The doctors did the best they could, which
was not much, tying off blood vessels, packing the huge wound with gauze. They discussed possibilities, queasily: skin grafts?
A face transplant? But such a
thing wasn’t possible. Would it ever be? Wasn’t that just the realm of science
fiction? No one in the ER had ever seen
anything this extreme, not even the plastic surgeon who had put faces back
together into a semblance of normalcy after hideous burn disfigurement and
automotive catastrophe. Still his heart kept on beating, and beating.
He won’t make it ‘til morning.
Are you sure? Look, there’s still a good strong pulse.
My God.
What’s he going to do?
The surgeon, ashamed of himself, prayed
that he would die. He got loaded that
night, just sat there boozing in the murky dawn half-light, then stuck a needle
in his arm, full of Demerol. It wasn’t
the first time he’d done that, but it wouldn’t be the last time, either.
In the morning, Szabó became conscious for
a while, before slipping into a dark and muddy coma, swimming deep in some
subterranean cave of his psyche for several days. He saw his father’s face in
the coma, heard his cranky, complaining voice haranguing him for being such a
failure, he saw his mother Magolna as she looked in her youth, beautiful,
full-lipped and laughing, and he saw other things, things he never wanted to
think about again, seared indelibly into his mind so that they replayed
automatically in this deep state, as if they had been pre-recorded on an
endless loop.
A new nurse came on shift, and began to
feel sick. She was overcome with nausea
at the sight of him. Another almost
fainted and had to be relieved. This was
an experienced nurse, one who could tie off arterial gushers and sling around
bloody afterbirths like they were so many McDonald’s hamburgers, but even she
couldn’t stand the sight of him.
This was as shocking as the case of the
two-headed baby born in Argentina
Szabó lived. Strangely, after the shotgun blast that
annihilated his face forever, he lost the urge to die - which is not to say
that he gained the urge to live, but it was enough, just enough to get him through. Perhaps it would have made sense for him to
swallow cyanide or throw himself in front of a train. Instead, he joined the kingdom of night,
slipped into the realm of the dusk-dwellers, which is where he had always
belonged anyway. Now he was an official
card-carrying member, a member of a strange organization with no organization,
full of heroin addicts and hookers and crazy people living in a twilight
world. Intractible suffering was not a
place visited, but a permanent home. His
passport was his face, or the lack of one.
His white cane thwacking the sidewalk warned everyone in his path to get
out of the way, here comes Szabó, or what’s left of Szabó, the man without a
face, the blind painter who no longer paints because he can’t see the
canvas. Can’t talk because he doesn’t
have a mouth. Can eat, through a feeding
tube; can make sounds, as his larynx is completely intact; can even sing. The spectre of Szabó singing, waving his
white cane back and forth in front of him on a fine spring morning is enough to
send everyone scurrying for cover. Can’t
see; can’t talk; can sing, and seems to know every operatic aria written for
the past 200 years.
Szabó mounts the steps of the Number 42 on
a wet Wednesday morning in the springtime, at 9:47 a.m.
precisely. The bus is on time, for
once. The driver sees him get on, and
thinks: oh, that guy. He’s a regular, all the drivers know about
him, they talk about him sometimes, tell stories, but you don’t know what to
believe. Bert Moffatt the bus driver
feels sorry for Szabó, wonders what deformity lurks under the blanketlike
covering over his head, some cauliflower growth or third eye. Would probably be
sick if he saw the mass of scar tissue that used to be a face, the nose hole,
the hole for the feeding tube, the hint of an eyebrow left, but no eyes. Szabo keeps it covered, he veils himself,
knowing the world is not ready for a man with no face. He sits down on the orange plastic-covered
sideways seat reserved for the elderly and the handicapped, beside a
youngish-looking woman with straw-coloured hair pulled back in a ponytail and a
faded green backpack stuffed full of old junk.
Bus People Part One
Bus People Part Two
Bus People Part Three
Bus People Part Four
Bus People Part Five
Bus People Part Six
Bus People Part Seven
Bus People Part Eight
Bus People Part Nine
Bus People Part Ten
Bus People Part Eleven
Bus People Part Twelve
Bus People Part One
Bus People Part Two
Bus People Part Three
Bus People Part Four
Bus People Part Five
Bus People Part Six
Bus People Part Seven
Bus People Part Eight
Bus People Part Nine
Bus People Part Ten
Bus People Part Eleven
Bus People Part Twelve
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)